I wonder if I will ever actually feel comfortable living alone. I love the privacy, the solitude, and the self-made noise, which is no reflection at all on my roommate or other girls on my floor, of course. I’ve been living alone on campus for the past five days, going for daily runs, long walks, tinkering around on my computer, reading, and talking with my brother and my mother. None of this bothers me. Of all things, it’s the bugs. And it’s always the bugs, even in my parents’ bug-free apartment in Charlotte. Here, there are potato bugs/lady bugs, big-ass retarded flies that slam repeatedly into the window, and these…

An interesting, interesting event. The entire evening/morning was scheduled around panels (and meals), including a student (undergrad) panel, a career panel, and a bioinformatics panel. There was a speech and a single panel the first evening. The others were Saturday morning. I always find myself in a sticky place at these types of events, in which a minority gets together to discuss the fact that they are a minority, which much of the conference felt like. Okay, so women are a minority in the computing field, and it ain’t getting any better (worse, in fact). Why are we sitting here finding all the differences between male and female coding methods,…

The first spring I lived in North Carolina, I had the worst allergies I’ve ever had in my life. I normally suffer through sinus problems, asthma-esque symptoms, and occasionally hives on my scalp (there’s nothing quite like the feeling of scalp hives–it’s like a thousand bugs crawling through your hair). That spring, though, I went through all of the above plus another interesting one that I’m still not sure what to call. To show me how it worked, my doctor took a wooden pokey stick and drew it lightly down the inside of my forearm. Aside from the tickling sensation, nothing happened immediately. In about 20 seconds, however, a large,…

Today was a beautiful day. I’m not even going to say “despite it being Singles Awareness Day and the fact that I am singularly single”. It was just a beautiful day for me. I slept in until about 09:00, woke up to find the sweetest Valentine’s Day card from Mae taped on my door, played around with the 2.6 kernel and bootsplash after hearing good things about it at the Linux Users’ Group meeting last night (blatant geekfest–I haven’t had so much fun on a Friday night in a long time), and then left campus on my own for the first time in about a month. Today’s off-campus excursion was…